I’ve previously written about how playing a game allows you to see life from another perspective. Mostly this is through sharing the experiences of the other people at the table, but sometimes the mechanisms and components of the game themselves offer a chance to participate in a powerful story. They ask the player to enter into a discussion about worlds they may never know in their own life. Sometimes, they open the door to a place we all hope we never have to go. This is the case with The Grizzled published by Cool Mini or Not.
The Grizzled is a war game, but it is not a war game in the traditional sense. The Grizzled is a story about the men clinging to life and sanity in the trenches of World War I. Fighting is constant, but the game doesn’t touch it. There’s death all around them, but the game doesn’t turn a camera on it. Instead, it focuses in on the fears and stresses being felt by a group of 2 to 5 soldiers.
Each player has a hand of cards dealt to them. They show a type of day (snow, rain, night, etc) and a fear/stress (gas mask, siren, bullet). There are also special cards called trauma cards. These represent some character trait that surfaces or some mental scar that they receive during the fighting. A selfish person refuses to help his fellow soldiers. A prideful person will refuse to leave as long as they still have something to add to the mission. Sometimes the soldier has seen so much that they just go silent – refusing to talk to anyone and losing the ability to communicate what they have seen or feel.
Players in this cooperative game continue to play one card at a time trying to avoid matching any three types of day or stresses. If that happens, the mission fails. The game continues, but every failure is hard to recover from. The ultimate goal is to remove a stack of cards that covers the peace card – representing the end of the war. If that is done successfully, the Grizzled have made it through the war and peace reigns. However, when a mission fails – or all the players withdraw willingly from the mission – any cards remaining in their hands adds another card to the stack. Sometimes this means that peace is just out of reach, only to have it get buried in a mountain of trials.
There is a way to move through this, removing stress and fear along the way. You just have to help carry each other through. When a player chooses to withdraw from a mission or plays their last card, they place a support tile on their character. The support tile represents reaching out to a fellow soldier and encouraging them to keep going. If a person receives enough support – they can remove accumulated trauma cards – freeing them to make actions they otherwise wouldn’t be able to make. Past mission leaders also have the opportunity to make speeches – bolstering the troops and allowing them to potentially get rid of a card in their hand, overcoming their fears.
It’s rare that the mechanics of the games I play so perfectly boil down such big and soul-heavy issues into smaller, easy to interact with, morsels without trivializing what they were trying to talk about. But The Grizzled does this perfectly. Players want to play well for their friends, yet know that they could be the one who ruins the game with every card.
Every time we revealed the peace card – only to have the mission end and a pile of cards cover it up again – we felt a small part of the sadness when peace talks turn into new fighting. At every turn we knew we were facing against terrible odds, but knew that if we were going to get out of this at all- we would need to work together and support each other. If we couldn’t help each other make it to the next day, none of us would make it out at all.
I think one moment that solidified the power of this game was when a friend of mine – a teacher with aspirations of using the game to help her students connect with the war literature they were studying – drew one special card.
At that point, we pretty much knew that we were doomed. The pile of cards that covered the dove of peace consisted of most of the deck, we had run out of every tool we had to mitigate the horrors of war, and a series of failed missions had left us all traumatized. We were playing out our last days, and then she pulled it.
She started laughing, and I swore her eyes were tearing up. “This is what makes this game great,” she exclaimed, as she revealed Christmas Day. The only card in the deck that doesn’t bring about new troubles. The cease fire card. Not only does it not add some new horror of war to the mission, it actually allows one of the players to remove one of their trauma cards from play.
The Christmas Day card represents the ceasefire where soldiers that had spent what felt like a lifetime fighting each other enjoyed a ceasefire – turning the battlefield into a soccer field. It was the day that they got to forget that they were soldiers and remember that they were just men trying to get home at the end of it all. In some small way, it made us feel that way too. It let us all breath a sigh of relief.
We were brothers and sisters in arms who could make the pain stop for one brief, shining moment. Yeah, we were just playing a game – and at no point do these feelings equate. However, it gave us that point of connection with each other and with those soldiers. If we felt that sort of crushing depression and inevitability because some symbols on a card were matching, how much more did they? If we felt that glorious relief during one day when the fighting stopped, how much more did they? It did not trivialize any of it. It made it more real.
I will by simply sharing with you what made me want to get this game in the first place. This is the exact text of the “statement of intent” that appears in the beginning of the rule book.
At the same level as literature and
cinema, games are a cultural media
which is undeniably participative.There are no subjects it can’t broach,
though some are more delicate than
others. That of the life of the Grizzled
is one of those.Guided by the deepest respect that
the suffering endured by these men
has inspired in us, we’ve worked in
designing and tweaking this game with
this constant concern.In this collective insanity we’ve
chosen to focus on the individual, with
his preoccupations and his daily fears.
The only escape for these men is to use
their solidarity, their brotherhood,
and their ability to help each other in
order to save one another, each and
all together.Without ever touching on the warlike
aspect, “The Grizzled” offers each
player to feel some of the difficulties
suffered by the soldiers of the
trenches. Thus the tension around the
table will often be intense, as will the
emotions.The path to victory may seem difficult,
but don’t get discouraged – persist and
get through the Great War!
This game is brutal – but it should be. I’ll recommend this game if for no other reason than sometimes you need to feel what happens when you survive a beating alongside your brothers and come out victorious.